Broke barefoot and pregnant

“Fertility and babies are not diseases,” said Jeanne Monahan of the Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity, which has been fighting against requiring insurance plans to cover contraceptives under the new health care law.

Oh isn’t that just precious – working for “Human Dignity” by trying to prevent women from avoiding pregnancy. Working for “Human Dignity” by forcing women to get pregnant and have children whether they want to or not. Yes, that’s my idea of dignity all right.

…many social conservatives are simply opposed to giving women the ability to have sex without the possibility of procreation.“Contraception helps reduce one’s sexual partner to just a sexual object since it renders sexual intercourse to be without any real commitments,” says Janet Smith, the author of “Contraception: Why Not.”

Oh get over it. Sneezing is without any real commitments, too, even if you make someone else sneeze. Anyway forcing women to get pregnant is hardly the way to prevent them from being just a sexual object – a baby-machine is a sexual object.

What we have here is a wide-ranging attack on women’s right to control their reproductive lives that the women themselves would strongly object to if it [were] stated clearly. So the attempt to end federal financing for Planned Parenthood, which uses the money for contraceptive services but not abortion, is portrayed as an anti-abortion crusade.

33 Responses to “Broke barefoot and pregnant”

Back in my fundy days, while most Evangelicals were anti-abortion, they were A-OK with most contraceptive methods. Even people like Tim LaHaye were recommending the Pill (though many were still in favour of large families). Only a few (and those the more Catholic-influenced ones) were insisting on rubbish like NFP. Seems like that’s changed a bit in the last 30 years.

This reminds me of a Catholic who was telling me about the importance of accepting the consequences of sex. This utterly baffled me. It was like he thought that sex was some kind of contract, that legally obligates women to pregnancy. That birth control was somehow reneging on a pre-existing obligation, like escaping from jail or something. To be honest, I don’t think I gave a very good response, because I couldn’t wrap my head around how this could make sense to anyone in the first place.

It made even less sense when applied to pregnancy due to rape. How can anyone be called responsible for the consequences of something that she never wanted, or even strongly resisted?

Honestly, I think this is one of those things that only even begins to sound coherent if you buy the whole package. If you accept that women are really here to be baby machines and keep house AND that that’s because that’s how God made them AND that there’s something inherently wrong with sexual pleasure AND you buy into souls and other stuff about personhood AND a load of other crap, then it hangs together. Each new feature makes the whole thing more and more ridiculous, but it gets to be such a large coherent network, that apparently people buy it even so.

@3: Did these people ever actually have sex with someone they loved? It’s “not real” unless you’re possibly making a baby? But going through the rigamarole required by NFP methods magically doesn’t interfere with the commitment?

Now having said that, I must acknowledge that I’ve heard testimonials (from eg. a devout RC friend) that in fact, practicing Church-approved family planning did improve their relationship. Fine, each couple to their own fetish — just don’t demand that everyone else get off on your kinks. (BTW: our friends have seven kids, and the outcomes, averaged over the lot, are rather middling).

I find the commitment issue hilarious. To me, it really sounds like she’s saying that contraception reduces men to sexual objects, purely for the pleasure of women. Obviously men shouldn’t be made sexual objects. That’s the woman’s job!

All right folks; it’s obvious you didn’t pay attention to my last lecture so I’ll summarize it for ya!

Sexual intercourse is ONLY to occur between married couples, at home, in the big bed, with gritted teeth, with the lights off, in the missionary position, for the single purpose of procreation. It is not to be enjoyed. You may only do it if you hate it and preferably it should be painful! And remember: If you don’t intend to have babies then you must not have sex. Abstinence is the only birth control method – use it!

Obviously I meant to say “heterosexual married couples”. Remember every sexual act must be “open to the transmission of life”.

It just occurred to me that if you give your partner an STD you have fulfilled this requirement whether a child is conceived or not. The Rattenfaenger never specified what kind if life must be transmitted.

Not to mention they also consider learning about sex in health class to be beneath human dignity. The FRC may honestly think that if no one tells teenagers about sex, they won’t be able to figure it out on their own.

…many social conservatives are simply opposed to giving women the ability to have sex without the possibility of procreation.

Man, “simply” is really the arch-mustelid of weasel words, isn’t it? You could make anything sound reasonable if you hedge it like that. “Many sincere Muslims are simply opposed to leaving women vulnerable to attack by sending them out unaccompanied by a male guardian.” “Many concerned husbands simply want the best for their wives and find that physical discipline is the only way they can mediate her self-destructive, irrational outbursts.”

I love the way these people have co-opted a variant of the term “sex object”, which of course meant something totally different in 1960s feminism. “My husband treats me like a sex object,” meant something like, “My husband never talks to me, but shows interest in me only if he wants sex.” The person speaking was not necessarily opposed to having sex or being lusted after by her husband, but also wanted other aspects of a full relationship of equals.

Contraception doesn’t prevent you from talking to people; it only prevents pregnancy.

A useful 1960s expression is being co-opted as an anti-sex expression, when it was really a treat-women-as-full-human-beings (which can include their sexuality or sexiness) expression.

Valdyr – that reminds me of a comment on a thread at WEIT a week or so ago, a reply to something I’d said, informing me that people who do things like stoning girls to death don’t think of themselves as anti-well-being (the thread was about Sam Harris’s book, of course); they think they’re being good parents and doing what’s best for their daughters. Srsly.

To be fair, Kant made a mess of this as well. His official position was “Never treat anyone solely as a means to your own ends but always also as an end in themself.” He thought this made sex for mutual pleasure somehow morally problematic, which led him to a weird theory of the basis of monogamous mariage.

But of course two people can have sex for mutual pleasure while treating each other as ends in themselves as well as instruments of each other’s pleasure. Even in the most casual sexual encounter, this usually happens, just as it does in other casual encounters, such as that between a customer and a shop assistant who may only ever meet once – you only have to treat the other person with basic consideration, be prepared to help if something goes wrong (your customer or your sexual partner has a heart attack), and so on. Taken literally, the Kantian maxim is pretty undemanding, and not useful for any precise analysis. It boils down to: “Don’t be ruthless.” That’s good advice as far as it goes, but that’s not very far. Still, Kant used it to rationalise all sorts of moral intuitions that must have come from somewhere else.

Distaste for sexuality is particularly likely to lead moralists like Kant and the Catholic Church hierarchs into wand’ring mazes lost.

Eamon at #4: Having decided, with my wife, early in our marriage (and several times thereafter) not to have a child, and having “lucked out,” if you will, contraception-wise I find your comment to be terribly insensitive, at best.

I can’t imagine myself, in circumstances other than this blog, where I would presume to “rate” my neighbors’ families, especially “averaged as a lot.” I imagine, Eamon, your being a judge at the State Fair cattle, sheep, and chicken exhibitions I used to observe. Animals at those exhibitions were prodded and pummeled, felt up and felt down, grasped and groped, marched and manipulated, and above all displayed. They were subsequently auctioned off to the highest bidder, who typically wanted the meat or the reproductive potential the animal represented.

I’m not quite sure, Eamon, what my neighbor’s sons or daughters might bring at such an exhibition/ auction, either individually or as a “lot,” but neither do I really want to know. They — to me — are individuals, as are the other human beings and even many dogs, cats, cattle, and sheep (if not chickens) that I meet. I cannot imagine that it would be any use to me to find a way to “average” them.

But now that you raise the topic, Eamon, I wonder why in the world you would expect any “batch” of human “git” to be, when “averaged over the lot,” anything other than “middling.” Do you perhaps live in Lake Woebegone?

Sorry to have offended you Poxy, it was meant as shorthand for “becoming functional adults”. Out of the ones who are of age, a couple have turned out quite well, and a couple have had, well, issues. IOW: I’m not overly impressed with the job our friends have done, and I have to blame some of it on the chaos of there being so many of them (and if they read WEIT, they’re probably no longer my friends as of this moment).

This talk of empowering or allowing the woman to fulfill her baby making duties really is inverting language or something. Dignity really ought to sue the Catholic church for the slander they’ve performed.

The thing that strikes me is that it’s not that conservative religious want the right to have sex only as a means to procreate, for that right is theres now. It’s not that they are forced to avail themselves of contraceptives if these are available, for they are not. It’s not that they must have abortions, because they do not. It’s not that assisted dying would require them to kill off granny, because it wouldn’t. What is so striking is that they want all of us, every single one of us, to be yolked by their dogmas and lead life banaly as them as if we shared their fetid morality. The arrogation and presumption behind all this stinks. That probably made no sense, but a rant don’t need to make sense!

By the way, I’m the 7th child of 10 little Catholic sprogs. Mum said she always wanted to have a big family and so she did. There’s lots of mythologysing about large families, how wonderful they are and all that, but in the end, the older children have to do a fair whack of the parenting of the younger because in your traditional family with dad out working (or sick in the case of my family), mum cannot mother a herd with the same degree of attention and caring as can be given to with a few children. Attention is spread more thinly. In my uninformed opinion smallish families are probably better and larger families are a bit selfish.

All decisions about family size are, and should be, “selfish.” Both large families and small families have succeeded, both large and small have failed to some extent or another. Deciding to have no children, as I have done, is “selfish.”

We object (at least I do) when someone seeks to impose a non-selfish criterion on family decisions. A criterion like “G-d says: don’t have sex unless you can get pregnant”.

Why should insurance companies be forced to provide coverage for contraceptives?

In Ontario, abortions are covered under our government health care plan. Eye tests for most people are not (it’s covered for children and the elderly). Eyeglasses are not covered at all, for anyone, and never have been. But I think it would be a fair argument to say that I need my glasses more than someone needs an abortion, barring an extraordinary risk to their lives (which, of course, I ALWAYS agree with funding, no matter what it is).

I’m sure that those insurance plans leave off things far more critical to the everyday lives of people than contraceptives are. So why SHOULD they be forced to cover contraceptives, and not those things? If you want contraceptives, you can buy your own. Or concerned citizens can donate and set up places where you can get them for free.

Of course, if they are required for health reasons, I consider that an exception, even if it’s hard for me to think of one at the moment. But for me, at the end of the day, I think it useful to put aside what she says and think about what she’s reacting against.

For people that have money, whether or not the insurance pays for that birth control is completely irrelevant. The people it does make a difference to are the poor, who might opt to not get birth control if their option is birth control or food.

Given that the poor are the people who we, as the rest of society, most want to have ready access to contraceptives, the rest of society should absolutely help to pay for the birth control of the poor (because the more accidental children among the poor there are, the more children are raised in poverty, which leads to more poor and more crime). Whether that is paid through insurance or some other means is, to me, irrelevant. But the rest of society should absolutely help to pay for this.

But where do you draw the line? Again, you might have a case for why it might be nice to have contraception funded, but I’m not sure that that argument stands up when placed against the other things that aren’t covered by that insurance. With infinite resources, we can cover everything, but we don’t have infinite resources.

Again, compare it to glasses. I don’t know of any insurance that covers them, and they aren’t covered under pretty much any government funding. But surely you can agree that for most people their not being able to get glasses to correct their vision is more serious than not being able to get contraception? So, do you feel the same way about glasses, that they should be funded? If not, why not? And if you do, do you think that health insurance companies should be forced to provide full coverage for them, knowing that almost all companies currently don’t?

Well, if you ask me, why shouldn’t insurance pay for glasses? People don’t choose whether or not their eyes go bad. So why shouldn’t we, collectively, pay for those that happen to need them due to an accident of biology?

Now, obviously insurance shouldn’t pay for designer glasses or anything like that, but it should definitely pay for eye exams and a very basic pair. This is what you get in England, for example.

And by the way, this isn’t about having or not having infinite resources. This is about how we pay for things that we are paying for anyway. With birth control, society as a whole absolutely, positively should pay to ensure broad access, because society as a whole will be made worse-off if this is not done. Whether that is done through health insurance or some other means is, to me, completely irrelevant.

Verbose – actually, no, I’d rather you didn’t address what you call “the underlying issue here” because it’s obviously not what’s of interest. (Not the point of the post, not the reason I wrote the post, not what interests me, not what we’ve been talking about.) It’s a change of subject. May you change the subject? No; I’d rather you didnt.

Seriously– this topic always brings to mind Hans Rosling’s wonderful stats, and in particular his talk on TED (http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_good_news_of_the_decade.html) connecting lowered infant mortality rates, smaller family sizes, and education for girls. Go watch it– you come away from it thinking that the Church (and religion in general, actually) is committed to securing the greatest possible suffering for the greatest number of people. But especially for children– those limbs of Satan!

Sexual health is part of health, Verbose. So is reproductive health. These things are more important and more expensive than eyecare–yes, it sucks not to see; it sucks worse to be forced into a choice between a celibacy and endless fertility.

[W]hile those who make this aberrant lifestyle choice [of abstaining before marriage and being faithful to one partner for life] should not be discriminated against, the rest of us—the majority of all sexually active adults—should be free to engage in grownup conversations about sex and desire and the reality-friendly ways in which we define and practice fidelity without being shouted down by the monogamously correct. Fidelity, after all, can mean so much more than just “you never get to see anyone else naked ever again.”